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16

GWEN

“So, Zoey.” Charlotte plastered on a smile. It looked more like a grimace. Her thick lashes disguised her irises, making her even more unreadable. “You must be from the shelter.”

I pressed my lips together, nodding slowly. “Yeah, I guess you could put it like that. Allie and I, we were pretty good friends, and I really just wanted to come and say my goodbyes.”

“Right. Sure.” Another one of those tight-lipped, annoyed smiles. “I appreciate that. How was your trip?”

“As nice as any funeral trip can be,” I said. “It really is nice to meet you, though. Allie had your photo hanging in her apartment.”

Her eyebrow quirked. At first, I thought it was surprise that her daughter wanted to see her mother’s face each day. But then she said, “She had an apartment?”

Her voice ticked up at the end.

“A cute little studio, yeah. She had a bunch of photos strung up, and⁠—”

“I’m sure I’ll get the picture once her box of belongings arrives in the mail.” She gave me a once-over. “How close were you with my daughter?”

“Very, I think.” Where was she headed with this? “Why do you ask?”

She glanced around the room, waved at someone walking past, then reached out for my hand. Charlotte wrapped her clammy, trembling fingers around mine. “Let’s speak outside for a moment.”

A few steps ahead of me, Charlotte walked down the stone staircase of the back door. Her golden locks glimmered like rays of the sun on the brightest day, blowing in the wind. At the foot of the stairs, she reached into her black handbag and came out with a pack of cigarettes. She tapped them on her wrist. She took one out and held it to her lips. Covering a lighter at its end, she held the pack out to me. “You smoke?”

I shook my head, descending the stairs. “No, thanks.”

Charlotte pulled in a long drag, the stiff posture she held inside the funeral home curling inward. Rather than perfect and pristine, she hunched in on herself. Between the smell of the cigarette and the sudden heaviness in her gaze, she reminded me of my mom. “My Allie. She was a wildcard.”

“Really?” I cocked my head to the side. “I always thought of her as sweet. Maybe naïve, but I never put Allie and wildcard in the same sentence.”

“She was sweet. And naïve.” Charlotte’s satin dress wrinkled as she sat on the bottom step. “But cocky too. She was so sure of herself all the time. Sweet when she wanted to be, but a smartass the moment you said something she didn’t agree with.”

Why did she say it like that? Like voicing her opinion, like having opinions, made her daughter a problem.

“Sure,” I said. “I liked that about her.”

Charlotte made an odd little sound, wiggling her brows. “I assume you know why she left.”

“I’ve got a good idea.” I leaned against the metal railing that lined the sidewalk to the parking lot. “Do you know why she left?”

“I know enough.” She spoke that on a sigh, a gray cloud of smoke floating between us. “Look, Evan’s not perfect. He never has been. But Allie wasn’t either.”

My chest opened again, like it had last week when Sebastian and I got into that debate. Like a black hole dropped through the center of my body, and fire licked every inch of my skin as I collapsed backward into it.

“My babies are my world.” The words sounded honest, but anger touched the edge. “I know how this world works. I know that Evan could’ve been better, and that Allie could’ve been too. But we are all losing her for a second time, Zoey. I think it’s best that we don’t go picking apart the past right now.”

The gravity of that black hole still held onto me, but the flames burned brighter now. Stronger than the despair, the hurt, of Charlotte’s meaning. The words she wouldn’t say aloud.

I’d hoped she asked me out here to understand. To question where her daughter had been, what her life had been like, how she looked in her final days.

Instead, she was asking me to keep my mouth shut.

I would not. I could not.

Still, I tried to keep my voice even, compassionate, when I said, “He put her head through a wall, Charlotte.”

She rubbed her forehead. “And she kneed him so hard in the balls that he had to go to the hospital. Testicle torsion or some shit.”